 Good evening, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to tonight's lecture. Before I get started, I just have a few statements to read. And so the first one to have a Lenape land acknowledgement. Tonight, we gather in Lenape, Hoking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors, and future generations, and in acknowledging as a school that Columbia, like New York City and the United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples. G-SAP is committed to addressing the deep history of erasure of Indigenous knowledge in the professions of the built environment generally and in the Western tradition of architectural education specifically. With this, G-SAP commits to confronting these institutional legacies as agents of colonialism and to honoring Indigenous knowledge in its curricula. Thank you. So tonight, it's a great pleasure for me to make the introduction and be the responder to one ex of Productora, who is here tonight as the Kenneth Frampton endowed lecture. The Kenneth Frampton endowed lecture was inaugurated 11 years ago in recognition of his 80th birthday with initial leadership from Stephen Hall. Now more than a decade later, where Professor Emeritus of Architecture, Kenneth Frampton, celebrates his 91st birthday in a few weeks on November 20th. The lecture has previously been given by architects such as Grafton Architects, Angelo Bucci, Eduardo Suda-Demora, Pijoy John, Lakotana Vassal, Kanjian Zhu, Yu, and Marina Tasbone, and Tatiana Bilbao. So we are pleased to welcome one ex to this illustrious list of great architects, and we thank and appreciate all the donors who have made the series possible. Tonight, Wonnie Wicks will give the talk. Wonnie is a celebrated architect, well regarded amongst his generation, and his background includes studying civil engineering and architecture at the University of Ghent in Belgium and the Etsom in Madrid, Spain. Sorry, he continued his studies with a master's degree in urban studies from the Center of Metropolitan Studies, CIMET, at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. In 2006, he founded Prodectora in Mexico City, together with Abel Perez, Carlos Bedoya, and Victor Jaime. Prodectora has received many awards for their work, including the Mies Crown Hall's America's Prize for Emerging Architects, and the Oscar Niemeyer Prize for Latin American Architecture. His office has also participated in more than, it seems, 15 international biennials, as well as being part of numerous exhibitions and lectures. Among the many publications from the office, the first monographed by Arkeen in 2010, and also with the prestigious Tucci Monograph in 2014. They recently finished Being the Mountain, a book on the relation between modern architecture and topography with ACTR and IIT. WANIX has taught architecture and urbanism at several universities in Mexico, as well as Harvard GSD, IIT, UCLA, Rice and Princeton. He is founding director of Liga, Space for Architecture, an independent platform that since 2011 stimulates an interchange of ideas and investigation on contemporary Latin American architecture in Mexico City. He has been part of Arkeen's editorial board since 2010, is an AIA international associate and serves on the board of directors at the Architecture League of New York. WANIX is also a professor this semester at Chisau. And with that, I'd like to welcome you to the podium. Thank you, Hilary. Now that you named all these things, I kind of understood I'm gonna talk about very little of things. I mean, I have to leave a lot of things out of the discussion. I don't know. I would like to thank as well Dean Amal for the invitation, not only the lecture here tonight, but as well to teach at Columbia. I'm really enjoying being back, wonderful group of students as well, to be teaching back in person. And Hilary again, thank you for the introduction and for joining me afterwards for the talk. It's a real honor for Proctora being here tonight to deliver this year's Kenneth Frampton Endowed Lecture. It's an impressive and much admired list of people that precedes us. I must say I was never really consciously aware of Frampton's writing and theory when I studied architecture in the late 1990s in the University of Ghent, but I did have this one professor who was always showing us the work of Luis Barragan, Cisa, Alto and Hudson. So I think one way or another, it must have had an influence on what we're doing today. Apart from those foreign architects and maybe from Remcolas or Coolhouse, as you say here, who came to disturb our provincial quietness once in a while, we were mostly embedded in a pretty regional, Flemish central European cultural environment. And so as Hilary mentioned, in an attempt to broaden my view on architecture, I applied for a scholarship in 1998 and moved to Mexico to study a master degree in urban studies. So basically studying urban anthropology, urban economy, urban sociology, reading and writing on the city. So eliminating a few forts and bags. Yes, you can put my partners on there, that's fine. Eliminating a few fort and bags between Europe and the Americas, it is then that I met my three partners who are Mexican, one is Argentinian. And about 15 years ago, we founded our office, Provectora. And since then we've been working and making architecture together. And so I will give this lecture, not only on behalf of myself, but on behalf of the four of us. As the build project really takes up a central place in our practice, I prefer to immediately jump in and to start talking about projects. I'll talk about nine different projects in the lecture. And so I will have to be relatively brief and I will only talk about specific fragments and bits and pieces of these projects while of course, allowing, leaving out the full complexity. The first project I would like to talk about is the Cultural Center in Terpansalco. It's a cultural space in Kuernavaca, a competition we won together with Issaic Broit in 2014. Basically, we were asked to build a 2000 seats auditorium in front of an archeological site to the 14th century Prince Panic Pyramid. And actually, this was our site. There was already an existing steel structure where they would host events and they wanted to redo this and convert this into a new state of the art auditorium or like a sort of theater space. So if you look at the existing pyramid, it's actually a really interesting structure. It's actually one of the few structures with a sort of twin staircase. And if you look at what happens on the inside, now you see that it's basically built in a sort of layer, time over time, different layers are at in every new moment of cultural celebration, they would add a new layer on top of that same pyramid. We find it really interesting to think architecture brought both physically and metaphorically as a sort of continuum that builds on the previous architecture. And this idea of historic continuity is something that will come back once in a while in the lecture. So for this project, we use the very similar strategy. We basically used the foundations of this existing auditorium, of the existing steel structure, and we kind of prolongated creating this triangle that just nearly fits onto our building site. We knew that we really wanted to use the existing foundations because if we managed to win this competition and so if we would have the chance to build our first larger public building, we didn't want to lose that opportunity, discovering some archeological leftovers while excavating, because that would mean that we would have to close the building site at least for several years. So basically what we did, we used this existing. So we basically used this existing foundations and the rest of the constructions built by just pouring a slab of concrete on the existing ground floor. Another thing that we found problematic is that this existing building was actually not really well aligned with the pyramid. So there was a sort of problem between accesses that we found kind of formally annoying. And we said, how could we maybe... So basically what we did, we kind of included a smaller triangle on top of this larger volume that slopes down toward the site and this smaller triangle kind of exactly finds itself in front of this existing pyramid. So what you then see on the competition rendering of the competition images is a sort of volume, sort of faillet sort of opening of this building that directly relates a little bit to the proportion to the mass and the volume of the existing building, creating a sort of dialogue between two different moments in time. That's gonna work. So here you see a little bit how the auditorium is organized. It's a big theater space underneath at the main in the center of this large triangle and a sort of large foyer space here and a smaller foyer here, both giving access to this different, to the theater space. Same thing from above. So it's really important for us to understand how this design and the geometry, the specific forms are often not kind of invented or proposed or designed by the architects, but they rather are discovered during a design process. They're unearthed distilled out of the complexity of a certain design brief, out of the complexity of the site, of the environment. And so in this case, the reuse of the existing foundation, but also search for kind of a clear geometry, robust, clear geometry in dialogue with the existing pyramid generated, that specific organization. Click a little bit through these different spaces. The clicking is going a little bit slow. The smaller foyer and then the main space underneath. So it's actually not really a theater space since it doesn't have a theater tower. It's like, that's why they call it an auditorium space. But basically they use it for all kind of activities, from music, the dance, theater, et cetera. And then of course that direct relation between these different elements. So and apart from the design brief to make this thousand seats theater space, we think we should ask ourselves always, what else can we add or how can we add quality to the urban space? Building is very expensive. It's an enormous investment of time and energy and money. And so public money in this case, this is a public building. So it's paid for by taxpayers, which gives us as architects another important responsibility, a civic responsibility. So the final question would then be like, how can we make this space, this area of the city better now that the building is there and what is different between the building today and then before? And better, not just in the sense for the users for the building, but for the city in general. And I think this is a very high and very difficult ambition. And often architecture has very little agency over the surrounding or little ability to influence beyond these lot lines. But I think it's still an ambition that we should always try to keep on the forefront of our thinking. The second project that I would like to show is actually the story of our office space. We used to have an office space in this beautiful mid-century office building by Augustina Randes and Juan Soto Madaleno. And after the 2017 earthquake in September 19, although the building was later declared stable and safe and sound, we got so scared about the way things moved and the way our office was that we decided to move to a different space. And every time an earthquake happened in the Mexico city, there's a whole movement of people that changing people that want to live in lower floors or other people that finally have the opportunity to get a place in a building that is declared structurally sound, but that is then available at lower rates. So it's every after every earthquake, there's a whole move of people. And so in this case, it was not only us, but also several friends that were looking for new office spaces. And we had a good friend who owned an old textile factory in the center of the city. And he always wanted to do something with that space, wanted to turn it into sort of creative office spaces, creative production spaces, but never found the right moment to start this project. And at that moment, this friend, Alberto Kritschler, said, okay, let's do this. Let's start working on this project. So we immediately moved in. It's a little bit of a mess, as you could see, but we immediately moved in with our office using one of these bays to kind of accommodate our people and our model workshop. And like the previous project, it also really tells a story about time and temporality. We started then thinking together with the owner how we could continue working on this project and kind of understand what could happen with the central patio and how that could become sort of a key organizer of the space. And it's a narrative about time, not only because it is, of course, adaptive reuse, so you put different architecture of different moments of time together, but also because it was, and it still is a fantastic opportunity to design on the go, to be able to mold and shape the space slowly, to add more and more people and different partners in this project over time, step by step, understanding simultaneously the opportunities this building offers. So slowly while inhabiting, rebuilding this building. And it's very important to understand that projects like that are only possible in when financial gains or like the fast return on investment is not at the center of the equation. It's actually our actual office space. When a project is not steered by what Raul Merodra calls the impatient capitalism. Alberto Kriessler, the owner of this building who guides this project, understood that to create something valuable one way or another, you have to make something that's meaningful over time. It also requires to invest in interpersonal relationship to adjust it over time, to expect maybe slower returns and to build this space in the city as a social cultural project. A third project is going to be completely different. It's a luxury beach house in the south of the Caribbean part of Mexico. Still here again, there's a sort of notion of time I would like to talk about. The building was cast completely in blue concrete. So it's basically the battery maybe, almost finished and we need to click it hard. The building was cast completely in blue concrete. So concrete with a blue pigment added into the mass and the provider told us not to use the coloring as it was unstable. It was not designed to be used in exteriors. As a natural and organic additive, the experts would not be able to predict how it would react in direct sunlight towards the salinity of the air or in exposure to the elements. It was changed you over time. At the studio, we really liked the idea to work with this unpredictability and the clients, a young creative mind, immediately supported it. The blue structure was raised in the jungle located between the sea and the lagoon underneath the Caribbean sky. This is a house with walls that reacts according to their exposure to the sun and to their position within the house, generating a range of tones that go from the blues of the sea to the pinks of the sunset. The project that Hillary know it because you've worked on this is a post of this previous luxury villa. This is a small low budget housing prototype in a two hour drive from Mexico City. And 32 architects were asked to develop one of these prototypes that could later could be tested there and implemented in Mexico City. And Hillary and Michael from Moss Architects did the master plan for this project and also designed this beautiful kind of learning and welcoming center at the entrance. Now the proposal that we made adheres strictly to the financial constraints. So it's really a sort of very basic elementary architecture that out of base 3.2 meter wide base very simple rooms and sort of central vaulted space that would avoid any need for circulation or central halls. Sort of flexible space in the middle that would create connections between the different rooms. A space also with a higher ceiling height space with more generosity and sort of generous outdoor living space. And this space that can be later enclosed or used in a variety of different ways giving the whole the same house a sort of flexibility according to the use. Here you can see the interiors are very basic like very simple bearing brick wall system relatively minimal sizes. But then this expansion in this central space. Actually the central space is the only space that is plastered all over because we really wanted to give that central space kind of the quality of an indoor room. So that it has a plaster and paint on all sides creating that central space as a sort of outdoor interior. And then we imagine that these places these different products could be placed next to each other in forming a sort of urban row houses creating a sort of rhythm over these special elements within the fabric of the city. Another project is also low cost housing affordable housing in Denver, Colorado. And in this project we were asked to think together with continuum developers and a local architecture building and who was a design builder that the contractors were on the project. And it really searches for different ways of how to densify the suburbs. There's a lot of cities in the United States that understand that there's a necessity to densify the suburbs that are close to the city center. And actually many of these things happening already here can see for example how several units live on our same roof in this building. But many of these policy like small lot development policies of the cities they generate sort of the developer driven architecture that kind of seems to be completely out of touch with a certain quality that exists in suburban spaces. And so if you look at this place in Denver if you look across the street the housing types are very diverse. One is stone, one is wood and brick but still even though they're like one is probably double as high as the other one there's still a sort of connection and a sort of understanding of a sort of morphology that makes this neighborhood work and makes this neighborhood work together. So we wanted to kind of play with that idea of the suburban house while it's still allowing a housing type in which in this case eight small units would share one building. You see the 150 foot lot is divided into 225 foot lots and on each lot we were allowed to build a front house and a small ADU or accessory dwelling unit. And so even the front house we tried to divide it up into two different spaces a little bit with a color coding as if there were like monopoly houses trying to still have a sort of smaller grain of building on the sides. And then also really thinking what can happen with this narrow in between spaces between buildings that though narrow we still found that they could have a certain quality in could allow people and these different projects to engage with each other. Here's the plan organization there's a ground floor and upper floor and basically everything you see yellow is kind of public space. You see the house on the right has a large kitchen a house on the left sort of living room. And so the idea is that everybody has their own private unit but still if you wanna watch football game with friends or invite people for dinner on a birthday party you could use these shared spaces. So it's really staging or trying to stay as a subtle balance between what is your private unit for privacy and the possibility of interaction. And then again here in a project with limited space and limited budgets I think it's again very important to create a sort of generosity into the architecture. So here we have this 20 foot long counters about six meters of actually it's two glue lamp beams that are glued together. So it's like one continuous surface without any joints in the horizontal sense or the vertical sense as well kind of this high ceiling under the pitch roof and to kind of allow that kind of long distances and sort of architectural quality in these spaces. In the ADU it works differently. It's a split level system with a roll up garage door giving it a sort of really an atmosphere of sort of art space or a working space sort of work living space. And since this is the first project that I talk about today that's in the US maybe it's important and probably suitable for a Kenneth Frampton in that lecture series to touch upon this friction between local and global environment. How can we as contemporary as a Mexican office make work that is very specific, very local, very embedded in a place and still create a body of work that does not depend on place or locality. And so for us it was really an enormous learning curve to start building in the US. In Mexico we often rely on special material quality or sort of crafty applications in the manufacturing of our work. In Mexico to build easy, sturdy and cheap we would build in concrete. The structure would often be also the final expression of the building. The structure in brick, stone, concrete or wood. In the US, as most of our projects were relatively low budget this whole game plan had to change. None of these strategies seem to work. In the end, these buildings have to be puzzled together with off the shelf solutions. By structure and finish were mostly absolutely different things. Handcrafted material quality was often replaced by choosing standard color options out of a sales brochure or defining paint swatches. We did not find this uncomfortable or natural. In both cases we found we had to work with local building systems and techniques. We try not to judge or to have a preference of one system above the other but rather to accept them as a given fact and to explore the possibilities in this case of slightly altering the conventions. In this case or in this image you see also that the non-descript location of this building is important. What interests me in this project is how architecture can respond towards such a generic suburban environment to accept it without being ironical about it but rather still understanding and enhancing a certain quality it offers. Next was a very small project in Los Angeles. We were not really sure if we had to accept this small commission but the client was a very interesting architecture critic and you have to have architecture critics on your side always. And he moved from being the LA Times architecture writer to a new job at the city hall. He became the inaugural LA chief design officer. So what happened at a certain moment was that all the books he had in his office at the newspaper he had to bring it home and one way or another he had to organize this in a new space, a space that could also serve as a small guest pavilion. So he said, how can we make a bookshelf and how can a bookshelf be architecture and how could this work? Now, of course the blue is very blue but in the end it's filled with books and it is this blue perimeter, this kind of horizon we drew in that pitch through space that kind of defines and organizes all the different elements. The desk, the relation to the outdoors, the relation to the bathroom, et cetera. Here, see again, the desk everything is integrated in that very basic gesture that kind of makes from a nondescript space and it tries to define a clear element. And then the contrast between this blue orthogonally organized interior of this space in a sort of pill-shaped bathroom all wrapped in a sort of, in a very simple white tile creating then sort of relationship through this continuous clear story glass frame between the two spaces, sort of thin line of glass that protects the books from the humidity of the bathroom. Now, when working on projects like that, one always wonders, is there enough design? Did we do enough efforts to make it something special? So it's not just a building but it's really architecture or that it's not just a bookshelf but it becomes really a project. I think we always struggle with that or maybe on the other hand as well. Did we do too much so it doesn't sit comfortable in the site anymore? Maybe it's too pretentious. It talks an unsolicited language. I think this question is always a subtle balance we try to strike in every projects. It's not about less is more or less is a bore or more is more. I don't know what all variants people have been made on them lately but it's about what is enough? How much, what is the right amount of ambition of intentions I can project into a project? I think that it's a very interesting thing that we always discuss in the project, in the office. Like, did we do enough? Is it enough? This house, another house in LA, our first project we did in LA was a house for a client. She owned a very beautiful little bungalow from the 1920s. She wanted to really redo it and revamp it and make something more worth out of it but we were immediately interested in that building. Like I said before, like not to judge it or not discuss if this is now valuable or not but it's okay, let's say this is a given fact that talks a little bit about a moment of urbanization of the LA Hills and to see what we could do with it. Now these bungalows are very nice because they're cozy and don't have too big windows so there's not too much sun coming in. But on the other hand, they don't offer like what for example the taste of the houses offer. Not this mid-century modernism where you have great relation between inside and outside and between the garden. So we said maybe we could kind of invent sort of device. We could add towards the bungalow and then that device could mediate between the inside and the outside between the protected space inside and the garden and the landscape and the view. So that's basically what we did. We add this basically sort of grid structure, sort of solo width like grid structure in the back of the house, creating then this space that really, really talks to the landscape or to the horizon or to the garden and really allows this space to be more open. And the beauty of this is that in the end the whole dimension of this whole thing was only defined by the existing difference between floor heights and that creates your module and then all the decisions kind of flow out of that automatically. So if you know that this is your floor height and this will be the width and then you'll probably in plan you'll have to accommodate that width. So here what happens the whole thing peeps out from the back a little bit because it doesn't really align. And I think that's that beautiful friction that then start to exist between the existing house. Here there's a column in the middle of the expensive opening we made in the bungalow. And I think it's just that friction that I think we're looking for in projects to make sure that both elements can kind of coexist and still create not an A plus B but still create something new together. We often actually worked in our office with kind of I show actually relatively little projects today but with kind of grid structure because we think it's a really interesting system to work. And I just saw this work by Louis Kamnitzer a few weeks ago. It's actually on show now at the America Society. And I find it very interesting art piece because basically every aluminum plate is the same plate and it has the same type of engraving but the only thing that really is mentioned is the position of that plate. And I think when working with grid structures in architecture becomes really interesting to see that grid structures are really about the position of spaces within that larger thing. Normally when people think about architecture, grid-based architecture, they think about sort of autonomous architecture and architecture that refers back to the discipline to the organization, something that has nothing to do with context but just I would say, I would argue is the opposite. The more we use that grid system, it's all about context. It is, if every room is architecturally similar, the same depth, width and height, then it's not the architectural quality that differentiates between spaces but only its position, its place. It's like a corner office. Probably all the offices are the same but one office is different because it's the corner office. Zoom in so you can read it better. Rooftop Prem, this is almost the project number eight. This is a project we did in Mexico City. We were very honored to receive an AIA New York Honor Award for it this year. And it's a project on top of an old 19th century palace in center of Mexico City where the client actually in a very smart way he's been using that building as a sort of as found object and has been trying to rent it out for parties and weddings and really understanding the quality of this building as a sort of built up sort of almost kind of vintage entity like sort of worn down entity. The only problem that he had is that a lot of times in the rain season, a rain gets into these patios and he cannot really organize this event or has to stop these events. So he asked us to cover these three patios with a sort of something that would protect it for the rain, probably something light, preferably something light weight. So we started thinking about something instead of covering each and every one with a different structure, why don't we do one structure over the whole volume? And so system with 50 rows of little feet could carry and that could maybe even still use these spaces in between the patios as additional spaces to use even when it's slightly raining. So you see like some construction pictures and actually the view from the inside, we work with this polycarbonate panel because we really wanted to still see a blue sky from within these patios and to really create a sort of very open and transparent effect with a lot of light coming down. It was really interesting for us to work with materials we were not that used to work with in the end. The floor is a composite wood decking. It's all kind of industrial materials, materials that have to do with industrial production, ferry or post, for example, to the existing building. These are nylon netting, nylon polycarbonate composite wood. And I think in the end, it created a sort of very intriguing contrast. These actually are like nets used in the agricultural industry to create extra shape. Then of course, a vegetation. You see, for example, the structural expansion joints over which then the polycarbonate panels would just continue. You can see a little bit this contrast between these different buildings, like this, and how this was all made out of materials that one way or another are related to earths, to organic materials. And these are more like synthetic industrial materials. And it's really interesting to see because in the daytime, these kind of cheap industrial materials kind of blend in with all the mess of stuff and tarps and plastic rainwater stuff that's on all the different roofs of Mexico City. While in the night, it just becomes sort of a glowing element that shows itself into the city. And I think what's interesting, a lot of times when you work in these historical buildings that you do not discuss too much, like is this a good building or is this a bad building? Is it historic? Is it valuable or not? But the success of many of these projects is to just accept the building as a given and trust that you will be able to deal with it one way or another. The last project is a project, the Houston Endowment, a small, like a medium-sized office building in Texas, competition we won in 2019 together with Kevin Daley and TLS, the landscape designer, and which is under construction now. So it's gonna be our first larger building in the U.S. to also see my public building. So we're very excited about this. This is the site, spots part, because this part of the site, it's part of the Buffalo Bayou, the green belt that goes straight into the downtown of Houston. And this park, one of the important moments in during the competition design is what the landscape architects, they discovered that it was not always such a bare site, it was actually very, there was a lot of, it was very forested and it was really part of that kind of long extension of woods along the Buffalo Bayou. So we really wanted to make sure that when working on this project, we could kind of at least redensify the perimeter of this project, allowing some internal matter still to exist, but really to make sure that we could densify again this outer rim of the park. And that meant that the building, which was actually had to be placed here, that that would actually become part of a forest. It had to be one way or another sort of canopy. And so basically, this had to be our building, something that would give continuity to that circular protection from this inner matter. This is some of the models we made for the competition, it becomes sort of very open scaffold structure, of columns and open spaces. A sort of large canopy that is carried, carried by these very long slender columns, allowing both the visitors of the park and the people of the Houston Endowment to basically share the same shade, the same roof structure, the same color, same here, the same image a little bit from further away, creating these different filigrees and different lines to protect the inside from the sun and allowing different views towards the park. So this is a working process, construction started a few months ago. And so now we're in this exciting moment where we can start looking at a lot of the facade, facade mock cops and the louvers that are actually produced in Mexico by Kinetica, a really interesting firm. And I wanna show you quickly as well, the mock-ups for the signage made by MGNCo, by Noemina Dinareto, which is really beautiful. It kind of, as the building becomes again a sort of open structure, it kind of allows the sun to play with it. And I mean, no credit for me here, this is all work by MGNCo, but I thought it would be a good way to end the lecture because they made ends as well. So thank you so much for your attention and let's see that. Thank you. Thank you, Moni, for the talk. Okay, I guess I wanted to start a little bit with, you presented nine projects in the first image, nine squares grid even. So that already I think gives a little bit of a hint and more than a hint to what you're working on and thinking about in the work. So there's a range of projects, different scales, different types. And I wanted to start a little bit there and could you maybe elaborate a little bit more on what it means to you and your office in working on and working across scales. It's funny you say the nine square grids, because actually I was brought up in Gens, I mean, the pedagogy of the school where I used studied architecture was based on the American model of the nine square grid. So we were basically building nine square grids for the first years. But scale, I think it's important and not important in a sense that as you see, I've showed like projects from different ranges going from like larger buildings to smaller ones. And I think in the end, they're kind of, well, I think they kind of have the same drive behind it in one way or another. I know that there's a sort of interest in a certain legitability and clarity. And I think especially with larger scale project and now that we're working on a larger scale, this question that came up, did we do enough? Did we do too much? Did we do too little? It becomes very complex I think because at a certain moment when your buildings grow like it kind of allows for more experiences and more. And then all of a sudden this idea that we always worked with of this clarity and a single gesture and this one movement and this one single element that defines a project. I think now this is the moment in our office where we're starting sometimes to question this. Not like, how can we work with that idea in different projects? Yeah, I think that's interesting because there is challenges because you are scaling up. And so then I think it raises other questions around things like repetition. How you are working with geometry and the consequence of that ultimately in the form would be interesting to hear maybe a little bit more about that, how you approach things like symmetry and the kind of precision. Yeah, form is a question that comes up often and I never really know how to relate to form because I find it so and it also comes up a lot in discussions in the American Academy in a sense like the form finding and I never really know how to relate to it in a sense that I find it evident that there's a search for form and I think our design process is very much direct towards kind of discovering these underlying forms within the design brief or within the program or within the and so I would almost say that if we cannot design or if we cannot be specific about formal solutions but if they kind of are imposed to us it feels very comfortable. You have to not to forget we're in office with four people. So one way or another it's impossible to kind of, I don't know, do a sort of formal gesture out of your guts, because in the end and I think that's why the stark or the geometric tendency in our office comes from because geometry is like descriptive geometry it means you can describe it. I mean, like you can make agreements over it. You know, it goes from A to B or and I think when we work with the four of us on a project, I think it's a way to kind of have certain formal agreements and I'm not conceptually doing those really formal agreements and that's why grid systems work very well or like always going both in planning section and in planning section towards very basic geometric shapes, because it kind of allows us to you have to make an agreement between different people. Yeah, that would be a nice title, formal agreements. That would be a nice title for election formal agreements. Yeah, I also forgot to talk about the title of the lecture. That was one of my questions. Which is my studio title, it's a title where I and when I was preparing my lecture yesterday I was like, oh yeah, I started thinking about other things and I completely forgot about the title. But on the way here, because yes, you know how it goes. Titles, we discussed this Hilary. Titles, they ask you like four months beforehand the title of your lecture. So I don't really know what I want to talk about today. But I think the unadapted is really still very really interesting team. And I'm very happy that also even tangentially we're working on it with the students because it's the opposite of the idea of flexibility in architecture. You know, like the idea that architecture has to be adaptable and moldable so it can kind of take up changes over time and kind of a sort of ambition of architecture to always work and to always be adapted to the program. I think we have to think the other way around. We just have to accept that architecture is never adapted to the program and that the building is never. And I think the moment you accept that as a given or you even celebrate it as a given, I think that's the beauty of so much of this adaptive reuse project. All of a sudden the things don't really fit. Then I think, I don't know, I think you can start thinking about architecture in a different way where there's a sort of different fits between function and program and then the architecture as itself as a sort of physical construct becomes, and again, very important, I think. And that's what I like a lot about this idea of sort of unadaptedness. Yeah, that sounds good. I was also curious about maybe just, could you talk a little bit about working across? I guess I'll have two questions really and both about kind of working, I think, and the kind of method in a way of working and thinking through your projects because they're in all cases, you're working on different climates. And in almost all of the projects, maybe with the exception of the private house, but there's still moments of that, but more so as you're working in public projects and thinking about making public space and the kind of production of public space, cultural space, maybe to talk a little bit about the intersection between those two things, between climate, between public space. I think also, I mean, there's some projects you didn't show, the kind of public park, or maybe even, yeah, but I'll stop there. Yeah, and there's a lot of projects I didn't show and that's when you introduced me on the book and I said, oh, I forgot to talk about the book. And then you said then in the business, oh, I forgot to talk about that because of course we have Liga as well, our space for architecture, we just did this book, Being the Mountain, which fits perfectly in the Kenneth Frampton and Doug Lecture series, you know, like, and especially, I mean, if you ask me for a different between the public and the private, I mean, I think there's a, I think it's just, there's different ambitions, I think that are at stake when designing public buildings than when doing private commissions. And I think that's the reason or at least why we in our office are so excited to be able to work on public projects or like the use and download, which is not really a public project, but it's an organization. It's actually a private lot in that park. The upper part of that park is a private lot. So it's actually a private building on a private lot, but still do it's position in a sort of public realm, it has to be, I mean, it immediately creates a relation to publicness. And I think that we are very, the stakes are like slightly higher or something the moment you work on a public building and I think that makes it, I think that makes it very exciting because it can have a sort of a life that is completely, it has completely, it's even less predictable than doing private infrastructure. And it's also, if you don't make public infrastructure, you can never bring people to your buildings. It's also a problem that we see, you know, like it's kind of really nice to be able to have your architecture out there. And it seems as though also, struck by the Denver housing and the ability to create such an open space at the ground for, even though it's still contained and everyone has their own unit, but to have that inner life and exchange across units and almost a kind of subdivision of property in the context of understanding the kind of historical division of lots and ownership and those who don't have ownership access and, you know, kind of turning the block or sorry, not the block, talking about that too much this semester, the lot inside out and to reveal, you know, I think a little bit, you maybe sit somewhere along the way, some kind of friction, friction, you were talking about friction between local and global, but, you know, it's quite interesting to think in that project just a kind of friction that gets created within one lot and really undoing the way that we have thought of housing in the US, maybe through that example. I mean, when I talked about, like, trying to play a little bit with these conventions, that's, I mean, sometimes there's like this rare opportunities like we had that at the one way or another, you're allowed to design two houses at the same time. So it's like imagining that you work on a suburban lot, but you can design the house of your neighbor and your own house at the same time. And so that became like really, really an important drive for us in this project. So like what, I mean, we could make a sort of pilot project and set 225 foot wide pilot project, but no, it was just that weird given that also in this lot line, as you say, it kind of disappears. And that that could be a sort of driver of a project where if you go and watch TV, you go to the neighbor's house. And if you go and if your neighbor goes and organizes a dinner party. And so it's also not obvious at all. It means that it's really like two houses that are managed or like kind of living together in a sort of agreement. So I think trying to find out in every project where the anomaly of the project lies, or what makes that project different than every other project. And for example, going back to your previous question, I find it often very difficult in residential projects, in private projects, no, because they kind of really understand, okay, if we work on a remodel of a house in LA, what makes it so special? Like there's hundreds of remodels being done by architects. How can this lot and this plot or this client, I don't like to place the specialty on the client a lot because I think I want to pull it into the architecture and not into the person that lives in it. I think that is really, I think that's that same idea of unburdening a little bit what is there and to see what quality you can find. Yeah, well, very interesting. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that the library book is beautiful. And even in that, I just kept looking at the work and thinking about each project has this kind of set of lines, whether it is the kind of structural grid, the kind of wood slats. I'm just looking at the work as drawings, which you showed very little of, which is interesting. And we get some models at the end and I've been to your office in Mexico City. I don't know if you know that. And seeing the models in the space and just thinking about how there is this, kind of intense pursuit of, it is in a way a kind of geometric representation and a kind of structural is always visible and visual even to the representation of the lines becoming three-dimensional, almost more like a corduroy across some of the sides of this depth to it. And I was thinking a little bit in the Denver project, not to sort of fixate on that in any way, but even when you were talking about the economy of it and that almost as little as possible somehow to what you do, you still find ways that the joists are exposed and we see those as lines. And just that you can, there's variety and diversity in the work across the types and the scales, but you're trying to find a way to maybe say something about stringing them all together, whether or not that's necessary, but there is this kind of line that seems to emerge in the kind of pattern, which is, I think, quite beautiful. So material depth, you mean, or as a quality that's related directly to the architectural drawing? Potentially, but there is something and that becomes real. And so when you start to overlay those together, it's interesting to see what maybe can kind of emerge, but that there's still so much in the built work that separates it from the drawing, right? And so where do we find surprise? I think we've relied so much on renderings to tell us what we're going to see. And I think in the case that you present the work through the built work and then through some models and almost very few renderings, or if anything, think about the drawing from a pan and you show us that repetition, that it's more inner relief and it's quite beautiful. It's true. I showed very little plans today, for example. And I think you can see in the architecture, it's a very, oh, another drawing based architecture. You can also, I think, if you read through it through our architecture, you could even see that we draw into the AutoCAD and not in Rhino, for example. You know, like I think that are things that is part of a sort of way of making architecture that I'm absolutely convinced that generates a type of architecture. And I've never thought about it in that way, but it's really true. Well, but I want to be careful, because I'm not suggesting that there's some sort of limitation in ultimately what gets made. But we know that in drawing 2D, there are limits to that. We are talking about that today. No, but it's not a limitation, or I don't see that as a problem. It's just really, it's a way of, I would say, it's a way of being comfortable, us, in drawing such a way. Actually, I would even say, between the four partners, we would have different ways of, I'm a plan drawer. I like to figure things out in plan. For example, immediately, I would have Victor, for example, drawing a section, or immediately reading sections of what I would draw. And I think everybody finds a little bit his own tools in architectural production, and I think that the final result, the buildings that come out of this, of course, the direct translation of that, not of that idea, of that method of working, I would say, exactly. That's interesting. Maybe we should move to, I have other questions, but maybe we could move to the audience for questions. Laila, if there's anything in the chat. Hi, thank you. It was a really great lecture. So I'm really struck by how, I think, I see lots of thresholds in your work. You create these thresholds. You guys have these moments of these zones of, you talked about this public, private, inside, outside. And it's like, that you sort of defined the zones so well that the thresholds themselves become this negotiation for strangers, really. Like, you sort of trust the people who are inhabiting these spaces to make the decisions. And I wonder in your design process, how much do you acknowledge this uncertainty? Like, how much do you, only because I'm aware that you also mentioned you don't want to over design these things, right? Or over constrain some things. So how much do you think about this space in between spaces? And when are moments where you feel, OK, maybe this is enough. Maybe we shouldn't touch this with more material or we shouldn't constrain it in different ways. First of all, thanks for going first. It's always brave. The way I hear you speak, I think you have a very specific thing in your mind as well. No, a specific project. Can you help me to kind of figure it out? There's like three of them. There's like three of them. There's the one that you did with Moss, with the arch, that interior. That's one threshold, I think. And then there's the other, the bungalow, the addition. That actually is a threshold between the outside and in the house, a little negotiation bit. And I think there's another one as well, but I can't. But in both cases, there are private spaces in the end. I had this question a lot of times in lectures. Like, it's very weird because people, they go to the kitchen for a glass of water at night and they're outside. And so it's a very open space, very related to the. But in rural Mexico, it is very open. Normal people would have a lot of land. They would have a grandmother's bedroom there. And I would have a little kitchen there. And you know, like it is very open. And I think in those, I'm not worried or anything about the, or I don't really understand exactly where the question goes to, but I do think they're very specific spaces. And a lot of times when people talk about that openness between inside and outside, people talk, yeah, we blur the boundaries. That's the word always, we blur the boundaries. And I said, yeah, but apart from blurring the boundaries, maybe I don't think I'm, for example, in both the cases you mentioned, I think you said it well, you can clearly define these spaces. No, it's not blurring the boundaries. It's really, although it might have the same effect on one way or another, it's really like creating a sort of new space that is nor inside nor outside. And to also articulately define that space and to see what we can do with that space. I think that's what we're really, really interested in because I think that's a little bit, in our way of working, at least, the challenge to be able to draw hard lines on paper. And so we will never, we will, and it makes architecture very difficult because not, yeah, it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that. No, no, every time you have to think, okay, where is it? Where does it stop and where does it end? Because we draw in such a, I don't know, our way of working is just that things are aligned and things are defined as a space. So it becomes always a very difficult task. And I think that's interesting that question. Other questions. Hi, Wony, thank you very much for the lecture. It was a pleasure. I have a question to, because I want to invite you to talk further about the title. I think it's a very provocative and very interesting title. And you gave an answer in relation with, probably it was an answer in relation to an academic disciplinary conversation. And I'm saying this because not to be adapted, not to conform is to be against something. And in most cases is to raise a political voice against something, right? It's an action that allows us to understand social neglect, for instance, and many other attitudes, basically not to conform. And I'm saying this because you have given an argument that clearly was responding to a disciplinary discourse, to an academic disciplinary discourse. But as you were mentioning, architectural is contextual, right? So I understand that respond here at this up, but how would you respond in relation, for instance, to the US context or to the Mexico context? So what do you don't want to be adapted to in the US? And one, you don't want to be adapted to in Mexico. And with that, which is your critical position in both territories? I think it's very funny, Anna, because I think it's an excellent question. And actually I was already thinking a little bit about it and I was thinking about it in relation to your lecture from a week or two ago. Because there's a very different attitude, I think, in the way we would both react to certain given situations. And when I was at your lecture a week or two ago, I was really almost jealous or kind of excited by the way that you always were not accepting the condition. And there was always a way to go against it and to kind of support the things in a different way. And I think, and I hope I understand the question well, I think one way or another, I think we kind of do the opposite. We say, okay, this is how things are. Let's just accept them the way they are. And let's give that as a starting point to kind of see where can we twist things? Where can we, how can we find new solutions or possibilities that create a certain friction that, but within the framework of accepting it? And I think that question that you asked me keeps me very restless sometimes, you know? Like, to where do we have to kind of accept that, yeah, that given context and not first try to go against certain things we don't agree before really trying to play with it, you know? And I was also thinking, you know, like, I mean, if there's one thing super important about what I've been thinking about Frampton in preparation of this lecture, there's something very important about Frampton's work, you know, like for the last, let's say 40 years, it's exactly that idea of resistance, you know, like how to create a sort of architecture that kind of does not accept the status quo of the local or global conditions as a starting point. And I think, yeah, I think it's a sort of fine line we always try to play with, always to subvert things in a sort of, I would say in an intelligent way in a sort of provocative way in order to kind of understand to kind of show actually the conditions the way they are, like the suburban housing where we were talking about just now. Questions? Yeah, for sure. I think we were maybe a couple of questions ago just starting to talk a little bit about collaboration. And I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on that process, maybe first between the four of you and the kind of working method and because you started to say you work in plan, I don't remember now if you said Carlos, if someone responded in section, is there a kind of method? Maybe you don't wanna reveal anything either, but. No, it's not that we have a magic trick that we don't wanna share with nobody. But is there, you know, how does it, do you all come together at the same time? Do you, you know, I think just it's helpful for the students too, because we do a lot of collaboration in the school, I think it's, you know, we're teaching collaboratively in many ways as well. And so how do you begin to enter into a conversation? And particularly, I think, I kind of keep returning to the scales or the types, but, you know, it's very interesting to me to see how, particularly in housing, how you can have that work being done along other types of work in the office. And especially as you're showing, you know, pictures of the office, which is such an exciting space around a big table, everything is open, you know, when you, at least my experience when I was in your office, you know, kind of walking around, bumping into the tables at the side, you know, we didn't talk at all about the furniture and objects, but it's very much part of the office and the experience. And so I'm curious, like, how do you work collaboratively? And I think also you're working collaboratively, you know, with Kevin and Houston, you know, with Tatiana, with us, you know, we've had opportunities to have exchanges and what that means for practice more largely. Well, I think, I mean, it means, I think it's at the core of our practice, one way or another. And it's also the questions, the idea of authorship a lot, you know, like, I would say, like collaborating with people outside of the office is kind of an extension of what we do inside the office, in the sense that we feel very, so it's very easy for us, you know, like if we all of a sudden do a project with another architect instead of talking to three people, which would be the three people of my office, I would be talking to four people, which doesn't make a lot of difference, you know, like, so since the design process is already a relatively collaborative effort, I think like bringing other people into the mixtures is very easy. In the reason why we're comfortable working together is, and I must say now the office is growing, now that I'm spending all of the time in the US as well, teaching and working and living here with my family, we have to really fight hard to kind of make sure that we still have enough moments that four of us or at least critical mass of the four of us, two or three at least, and that we don't start like taking a project by ourselves, because we really believe that that's where the power of our office lies, the design quality, you know, like, and of course it's slow, and of course it's tedious, and I, you know, we have also an office with several collaborators, but still, I think by like having a lot of forts and back already on the design tail and different points of view, I think that becomes really a crucial part of the design. I know something else that I want to react to. I think just how you make it method and working and... Well, I think that the design table is really important. That's one of the reasons why we, for example, we say we don't look at the rendering so much because we have to look at the screen and you don't fit four people around the screen, you know, like you, so what works very well is models or drawings, because you can put them on a table and we can sit around it and so, for example, I don't know like the typical David Byrd play cards where you would like them to like bass player, pause the guitar on to, you know, like the typical architecture would be like turn your plan around, look at it from another angle, and I think we always already have that. Once when we're looking at a model on the design table in a dialogue and discussion, I'm already seeing a different part of the model than my partner is sitting at the other part of the table or my collaborator who's sitting there. And I think, I think that's really, I think that's really crucial to have a design process in which like it's different, not only different voices and different people, but also different simultaneous views are present. Any projects that really have brought you joy? No, not yet. Not yet? No, I think. You can't say all. I wonder what's kind of is the most like rewarding or the most, and I think one would kind of expect like the final product or the, for me it's the opposite. You know, like when a building is finished, it's always, I don't know, there are several worries and I know that some things could have gone better or this. It's really after a long time or when we finish a book, it's the same thing. I never liked it when we make a book. So like a year later, I start liking it. And I said, Oh, it was actually a really good book. You know, like it's too fresh. I think what I really, really enjoy is the, is that moment at the design table where we're like struggling and we have three or three weeks that we don't know how to resolve the project. And then all of a sudden there's always a moment or sometimes not, but there's mostly always a moment when something comes up and everybody knows that that's the right solution, that it's going to work. And that's, that's super fulfilling. And then it's just like, you have to just produce it, you know, like, and, and I think that, that moment of, of kind of being lost. I always tell my students that they have to allow themselves to be lost in their product. That moment of being lost and all of a sudden kind of managing to tie the, the, the ends together again. I think that that's, that's very satisfying. Any other last questions? I have one. It seems like there is a very consistent effort in building all of the projects or across scale that there you are preserving certain quality that belongs to your practice prep, belong to your firm. What would you, in words, describe that? Like how would you, how do you want your firm to be perceived? To be perceived? Yeah. That's a very difficult question, I think. But when we're working now for 15 years, so people have also been, I don't know, telling us how they perceive us, you know, like so slowly bit by bit, we're kind of starting to understand. But I, I mean, I don't know how to kind of read you the elevator pitch on the first top right part of my website, you know, like, but I think there's, there's there's, there's really an interest in my making buildings that are legible and legible. I mean, like, understandable at, at, at, at a lot of levels. So I think that's the beauty of a, of a, of a project. And for me, a lot about, about architecture that that the project is legible when I try to, it doesn't mean understandable, you know, like it doesn't mean like, oh, every layman can understand what this is about. But it's a, it's a sort of, it is sort of a manifestation of clear intentions and clear goals. And I think that allows people to kind of react to the architecture in a very direct way, you know, to really to, to enjoy it and maybe also to critique it or to kind of, if you draw a hard line, people can discuss it, the lines will not be more on the left or the right. And so it kind of allows people to engage very easily with your architecture. And I think, and I think that from, and that's also, that why it's an architecture that is easy to, to explain or to discuss with possible clients or with, with your partners on the table, because since, since we, we oblige ourselves to make very precise definitions, it also, I think it allows discussion and it allows reaction to it. And I think, I think that that's, I think something that I'm very happy with. Thank you. Okay. Has there ever been a moment when, you know, I'm not sure how the group dynamic works within your firm, especially with four people leading. Has there ever been a moment that you've sort of conceded either an idea or a form that you later realized that, you know, in, in the creation and the actual formation of that piece within your work. You wish you hadn't conceded that and sort of, if so, how do you resolve issues like that? It happens all the time, but at the same time, and that's the beauty of our discipline. It's such a slow process architecture that I think you never kind of oops, make a mistake and then that thing is built or something, you know, like, so I think a lot of times there's some things that you kind of understand that maybe that wasn't, that there's certain things you understand, especially when you go to a building site, as architects we're trained to looking at plans and sections and revenues to kind of imagine what the build building will look like. That's never really the case, you know, like every time you go to a building site, you're like surprised, oh, really? Oh, I didn't expect this. And I think since, since it's such a slow process, if there's things that are not, and that goes for the design process, just as for the building process, if there's things that are decisions that are maybe were probably not as smart. I think there's always a moment to adjust it or to reincorporate it into a different solution. Like that tool you make with X-Growth and then later you change it into a bird or something, you know, like there's always kind of a possibility to kind of correct the tool. And I think that's, I think that's, I think that's very interesting. The slowness, I think, I think that's something that I spoke about as well. I think the moments where you are allowed to be slow, which happens less and less in a sort of hard market driven architectural environment. The moment where you're allowed to sort of slowness to rethink things, to reconsider things, I think it's very beautiful. I get very nervous, for example, agony, the opposite of joy. I think that's something that I spoke about as well. I think the moments where you are able to go through the process of agony, the opposite of joy. You get very nervous. Nowadays when projects are defined with a sort of very straight timeline, as if architecture is sort of linear process where you kind of have after schematic design and D.D. as if D.D. is just a roll-out of this S.D. and no, in D.D. you have to reconsider everything you did in S.D. And I saw that I think that's very important that possibility to re-adjust every mistake you did in the previous space. There were no questions from the chat. I want to say thank you as well to Laila that organized this all evening. I know it's your last day. Thank you so much. Wonderful. Well, thank you all for sharing your amazing work with your office with us tonight. Congratulations.